21: Dictating to Dictator Trujillo

Pawley’s entrepreneurship and bilingual skills led to global success and wealth that gave him easy access not only to U.S. presidents but also to Generalissimo Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, who profited so much from the Pawley family’s thriving businesses that William believed he could dictate the course of the country. In 1955, Trujillo asked Pawley to help him write laws to attract U.S. investment in oil and minerals. That same year, Vice President Nixon was criticized for embracing the dictator.

On January 20, 1960, Jane Atherton Roman, who served as liaison between the CIA and FBI as a senior aide to CIA counterintelligence head, James Jesus Angleton, received a document that listed Edward Pawley as the subject. One who read it wondered if it was actually about his brother, William. The document noted that following trips to Florida and Cuba, “Catherine Taaffe, whose activities are well known to the intelligence community” advised that “there was a widespread belief among Cubans that the United States Government, and specifically CIA, was sponsoring anti-Castro plotting” and, according to former Havana lawyer Francisco Rodriguez Couceiro, Edward Pawley was working with the CIA on the effort. The document had a handwritten note: “Probably Wm D. Pawley Miami.” Mrs. Roman wrote beneath it: “Or his brother, Edward, who represents the Pawley business interest in the Dom. Rep.”

An English major graduate from Smith College, Jane Atherton worked in advertising then served in the OSS in 1944. A decade later, she married CIA co-worker Howard Edgar Roman who became a researcher for two books written by CIA Director Allen Dulles. Ten weeks before reading about the Pawleys activities, Jane Roman had opened the CIA's first file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. Marine Corps radar operator who, after learning Russian and monitoring U-2 flights over Russia, defected to Russia. By the summer of 1963, William Pawley and Lee Harvey Oswald would both interact with the CIA-funded Cuban-exile group DRE.         

In February 1960 an article appeared in the Miami Herald, titled “Smathers at Conference: Miamian Pawley Had a Part in Trujillo’s ‘Free Vote’ Vow.” While it mentions that Edward Pawley lives in Cuidad Trujillo and manages the Pawley mining and oil interests, the article notes that William Pawley is a longtime friend and an informal “economic advisor” to the Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who accepted his advice and promised “to hold free multiparty elections within a year.”1

At the Dominican Republic press conference, Senator George Smathers was joined by William Pawley who stated that he had recently sold all of his investments in the country, while assuring the media that Trujillo was not in trouble, even though he recently had broken up a plot to overthrow his regime. Pawley “told The Herald from Washington his motives were ‘patriotic—to keep another Communist regime from forming in the Caribbean.’” He claimed that Smathers and Trujillo “each recognized that the Caribbean is entering a new period. A revision of regimes unacceptable to democratic nations has to be made,’ Pawley added.”2

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39: The Détente Betrayal

William Douglas Pawley’s support of Richard Nixon in 1968 was based upon a longstanding relationship that began while Nixon was Vice President to Eisenhower, and it was reinforced by a mutual disdain for communists shared by all conservatives including E. Howard Hunt. But the times they were a changing as much as Bob Dylan switching from folk to country rock with his release in April 1969 of Nashville Skyline.

Once sworn in, President Nixon began to head down a different path from ruthlessly battling communism toward embracing détente. In February 1970, Henry Kissinger began secret talks with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho outside Paris, while the more public, formal peace process ground slowly away in the city. Pawley, like most Americans, was out of the loop on Nixon’s new strategy. 

Kissinger, a Harvard professor, had entered government service after John J. McCloy chose him in 1956 to "chair a study on Soviet American relations" then get a job as a speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller. McCloy was a hawk who believed peace talks showed U.S. weakness.   

Early in the Nixon’s first term, Pawley, unaware of his friend's evolving policy, had called the White House and told Rosemary Woods to pass along to the President a few comments: “How tremendously proud I am of the great job our friend is doing. All of the disbelievers around here—at clubs, restaurants, etc. are coming around saying—‘Bill, the man’s got it.’ It is excellent—we are getting it from all sources.” Pawley went on to say he spent “several days in Santo Domingo and talked to the President [Balaguer] there for an hour. He is probably one of the finest Presidents ever to have served in the Western Hemisphere. He is not interested in making any money—he is interested in country ... it is fantastic the progress that has been made since Trujillo’s death.”

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